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Power BI Drillthrough and Bookmarks: Guided Navigation

Michael Nocito · Updated August 2026 · Behaviour checked against Microsoft's own documentation, linked at the end

These are the two features that turn a set of pages into something a reader can move through. Drillthrough sends somebody from a summary to a detail page already filtered to the thing they clicked. Bookmarks save a page's whole state, so a button can put a reader back into it. This page shows how to build both, and the one setting that stops a bookmark wiping out the filters your reader chose.

What you do: put a field in the Drillthrough filters well to create a detail page, and use the Bookmarks pane with the Selection pane to save views you can attach to buttons. Neither needs DAX or a data model change.

The short version. Drillthrough carries a value to another page. A bookmark saves the state of a page so you can return to it.

Drillthrough: a detail page that knows what you clicked

Before the steps: what makes a page a drillthrough page rather than an ordinary one?

One field, dropped into one well. Everything else follows from that.

1. Add a page and name it for what it shows, such as Product Detail.
2. In the Visualizations pane, find the Drillthrough section and its Drillthrough filters well, labelled "Add drillthrough fields here".
3. Drag the field the page is about, such as Product Name, into that well.
4. Power BI adds a back button to the page automatically, so the reader has a way home.
5. Build the page for one item: a card with its name, a table of its transactions, a line chart of its trend.

Readers then right-click a data point on any page whose visual contains that same field, hover Drillthrough, and pick the page. It opens filtered to the item they clicked.

Say out loud why the field has to be in both places. The source visual has to be able to hand over a value, and the target page has to know what to do with one. If Drillthrough is missing from the right-click menu, that pairing is what to check, and the docs list a third cause worth remembering: it will not offer drillthrough on a field that is aggregated in the source visual.

You can also drive it from a button. Insert a button, set its Action to Drillthrough and pick the target page. Buttons are more discoverable than a right-click, which matters more than it sounds: a right-click menu is invisible to a reader who has never been told it is there.

Drillthrough is not drill down

First: a reader expands a chart from Year to Quarter. Which of the two features is that?

Neither, in the sense that matters here. That is drill mode, and it moves through hierarchy levels inside a single visual. Drillthrough leaves the page. Same word at the front, completely different job.

Cross-report drillthrough goes one step further and lands the reader in a different report in the same workspace. It needs matching field names and data types on both sides, has to be switched on in the target report's settings, and only works in the Power BI service.

Bookmarks capture eight things

Before the list: a bookmark saves "the state of the page". Which parts of that state, exactly?

These, per Microsoft's own list:

1. The current page
2. Filters
3. Slicers, including the slicer type and its state
4. Visual selection state, such as cross-highlighting
5. Sort order
6. Drill location
7. The visibility of each object, as set in the Selection pane
8. Whether an object is in focus or spotlight mode

Number seven is the one that turns bookmarks from a convenience into a design tool. Because visibility is saved, you can put a chart and a table on top of each other, hide one in each bookmark, and give the reader a button that swaps between them. Nothing moves, nothing reloads, and the page has two views in the space of one.

Open the Bookmarks pane from View ▸ Bookmarks in Desktop, or View ▸ Bookmarks pane in the service's Editing view. Arrange the page how you want it, select Add, and rename it immediately, because Bookmark 3 means nothing to the next person who opens the file.

The setting that stops a bookmark hijacking your reader

First: your bookmark switches the page from chart view to table view. A reader has filtered to their own region and presses it. What happens to their filter?

It is replaced by whatever was filtered when you saved the bookmark, unless you turn one thing off. Each bookmark has properties on its More options (...) menu:

The documentation says it directly: when you use bookmarks to switch between views, you likely want data properties off so filters are not reset. That single toggle is the difference between a polished report and one that fights the person reading it.

Picture your own report with a view-switching button on it. If a reader filters to their team and presses that button, does their filter survive? If you do not know, that is the bookmark to open first tomorrow.

Buttons, the Selection pane, and navigators

A bookmark on its own is a list item in a pane your readers never open. It becomes navigation when you attach it to something.

In Desktop, Insert ▸ Buttons ▸ Blank, then in the Format button pane turn Action on, set Type to Bookmark and pick your bookmark. In the service the Buttons icon sits in the top menu bar and the rest is the same. While you are editing, hold Ctrl and click to follow the link; for a reader, a plain click does it.

The Selection pane, also on the View tab, lists every object on the page with an eye icon for visibility. It is where you hide the table so the chart shows, before saving the bookmark that captures that arrangement.

Two things the docs are blunt about, and both have cost people an afternoon. Changing visibility in the Selection pane afterwards reverts it to the default, so right-click the bookmark and choose Update after any change. And slicers keep filtering a page whether or not they are visible, which is a feature when you are hiding a control on purpose and a mystery when you are not.

If you want a row of buttons, one per bookmark, use a bookmark navigator rather than building them by hand. It creates the set and keeps them linked to the group.

Edge cases worth knowing

Adding a slicer to a page clears the bookmarks you already made there. Get the slicers on the page first, then build bookmarks.

Bookmarks save state, not layout. Move a visual after saving a bookmark and selecting that bookmark will not move it back. Position is not part of the eight.

Personal bookmarks are a different thing. Anyone reading a report in the service can save their own, and they cannot be grouped or reordered except by choosing a default. Report bookmarks, the subject of this page, need edit permission and travel with the report.

Drillthrough page order can change after publishing. In Desktop the right-click menu lists drillthrough pages in tab order; after publishing, that order might not match. Do not build instructions that say "pick the second one".

Custom visuals may not support bookmarks. Most do. If one misbehaves in a bookmark, the docs point you at the visual's creator rather than at a setting you can change.

Why this is worth building

A report page can hold about as much as a reader can hold, and that is not very much. Both of these features exist to move detail off the page without losing it.

Drillthrough moves detail out to where it is only loaded when somebody asks. The summary page stays readable because the transaction table lives one right-click away instead of at the bottom of the page.

Bookmarks move alternatives out of sight without moving them off the page. The chart and the table share the same rectangle, and the reader chooses which one they are looking at.

Both replace the thing people do instead, which is to add another visual, then another, until the page is a wall and the reader stops on the first number they recognise.

How to apply this to your own work

1. Find the busiest page in your report. Anything on it that only matters for one selected item belongs on a drillthrough page.
2. Build that detail page with one field in the Drillthrough filters well, and add a button to it as well as leaving the right-click route, so the path is visible.
3. Anywhere you have two visuals showing the same thing differently, stack them and put them behind two bookmarks and a button.
4. Open every bookmark you already have and check the Data property. If the bookmark is a view switch, turn Data off.
5. Rename every bookmark to what a reader would call it. You are writing navigation, and the names are the labels.

If you have paper nearby, draw your report's pages as boxes and draw every route a reader can take between them, including the right-click ones. Any page with no arrow into it is a page nobody has visited.

Cheat sheet

The one habit to keep

After building any bookmark, use the report as a reader: filter something of your own, then press the button. If your filter disappears, the Data property is on and it should not be. That ten-second test catches the single most common defect in guided navigation.

Which page of your report do people scroll furthest down, and what is at the bottom of it that could have been a drillthrough page instead?